Friday, September 12, 2014

Harvard’s School for Engineering cuts cord on soft robots...

When it comes to soft robots, researchers have finally managed to cut the cord.
Developers from Harvard’s School for Engineering and Applied Sciences
and the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering have
produced the first untethered soft robot — a quadruped that can stand up
and walk away from its designers.
Working in the lab of Robert Wood, the Charles River Professor of
Engineering and Applied Sciences, a team of researchers that included
Kevin Galloway, Michael Karpelson, Bobak Mosadegh, Robert Shepherd,
Michael Tolley, and Michael Wehner was able to scale up earlier
soft-robot designs, enabling a single robot to carry on its back all the
equipment it needs to operate — micro-compressors, control systems, and
batteries. The design is described in a paper in Soft Robotics that
appeared online Sept. 1.
“Earlier versions of soft robots were all tethered, which works fine
in some applications, but what we wanted to do was challenge people’s
concept of what a robot has to look like,” said Tolley, a research
associate in materials science and mechanical engineering at the Wyss
Institute and the study’s first author. “We think the reason people have
settled on using metal and rigid materials for robots is because
they’re easier to model and control. This work is very inspired by
nature, and we wanted to demonstrate that soft materials can also be the
basis for robots.”